Posts tagged: Photographer

OK, so here’s the thing! – When I was first invited a few weeks ago by OMY to be a member of the media ‘Star Bloggers’ team to take part in the AsiaOne Adventure Race 3 which happens this Saturday, my mind – which often works in very mysterious ways – did some very strange things indeed.

Immediately, my hidden desire to one day participate in the popular TV reality show, The Amazing Race (or The Amazing Race Asia) boiled to the surface. Soon after, I started having flashbacks of the most recent instalment of the blockbuster movies, ‘The Fast and the Furious’… However, instead of seeing myself on the streets of Japan ‘drifting’ around sweeping bends, burning rubber while chucking doughnuts and using the handbrake for some radical manoeuvres, my mind was running 100mph trying to consider how I could emulate these skills on the streets of Singapore (without getting myself – or my team – arrested).

The OMY Star Bloggers Team

Obviously, there was absolutely no hesitation in my acceptance to participate in this inaugural event.

The first thing I did, was to go online to check out the event’s microsite, to see what the race was all about. On the home page, they have the following information:

“Form a team of four and pit your team against 91.3 DJs Jeremy Ratnam and Adam on June 11 in sponsored cars. Sort out the clues and complete the challenges in a treasure hunt that calls for your brains, brawn and beauty.”

Let me emphasise – Brains… Brawn… Beauty… well luckily for me, my fellow team members and OMY Star Bloggers have got my back on these critical factors.

As a media representative team, we are not in the running for the very attractive prize pool, but we are definitely in the running to secure ‘bragging rights’. You should know by now, that most Aussies are very passionate about their sports and usually extremely competitive!! I am no exception.

WTH – you may rightly ask… but the way we figure it, we have such a diverse mix of skills we are bringing to the table that we will definitely be a challenge to be reckoned with. We expect to remove the prefix ‘Dys’ completely and end up with a fully ‘Functional’ team.

Before you get too nervous and think that you better stay in on Saturday and tell all of your loved ones to stay clear of the roads, on Tuesday night this week, we attended a pre-race briefing, and my ‘Fast and furious’ delusions were rapidly shot down.

Of course, no event organizers are going to give out sponsored cars to a bunch of ill-bred street racers. It was made quite clear (along with a number of other regulations), that the first rule is to ‘follow the rules’ – the race winner is not determined by the team who arrives at their final destination first. Success on the day, will be measured by a points scoring mechanism as awarded at each of the checkpoints or activities (I think my team can all breathe a sigh of relief).

We were also given two mobile devices by Singtel which will be used in the day, and the kind team from there gave us instructions on how to download and use Apps on these Android devices. Jerome and Eunice have taken them home to charge and familiarize themselves with the technology. We also received a Nikon camera on which Eunice was fully trained on at the briefing.

At this stage, I’d like to offer a huge ‘Thank You’ to my team who were quick to nominate me as ‘Team Leader’ for the OMY Star Bloggers Team – partly because I arrived 30-minutes late to the briefing and the decision was made in my absence.

The vehicles will be provided by Sime Darby Select, who are the official car sponsors. The other participants all drew out of a ‘lucky’ draw for their car selection – the OMY Star Bloggers and the 91.3 DJ team had already been allocated a vehicle.

Ours is a Volvo XC60 T6! I have not driven a Volvo in my life, so after a quick Google search I found our car – pretty neat huh? I’m not sure if ours will be red, but below is a mock-up with some OMY and star bloggers branding… if you see a car resembling this cruising the streets of Singapore this Saturday, be sure to wave and holler at us!!

Our Hong Kong Travel Blog

In collaboration with omy.sg, the Hong Kong Tourism Board sent ten
bloggers from the Singapore Blog Awards 2010 to Hong Kong to experience the Hong
Kong Dragonboat Carnival, part of the Hong Kong Summer Spectacular Program.

I'm not even talking about computers or social media here - simple texting can be challenging for the 'age-challenged'. I recently caught the following gallery of very funny texts between parents and their offspring.All I can say is LOL (Lots Of Love) and WTF (Well That's fantastic) !! :)Compliments of Aussie Pete :) […]

Most of us go to work everyday to keep the order ticking along. At times, we probably think we'd rather be out fishing... but we understand that our commitments are such that we need to be able to provide - food on the table, safety and shelter for our loved ones, education and development for the little ones, to name but a few.(Scroll to bottom for vid […]

TIME MAGAZINE has once again published their Top 10 Pictures of the year.The 2013 selection does not fail when it comes to capturing what words alone cannot describe.How better to come back from a few months blogging hiatus, than to share these awesome images and heart tugging moments, along with commentary from the photographers themselves.ENJOY!!http://lig […]

Well, this is one of those classic 'What The Hell' Moments...But the story gets weirder and weirder as the facts emerge.When a 10-year-old boy found a human mummy in a sarcophagus in a corner of his grandparents' attic, it left German authorities in a state of bewilderment.The mummy found by a ten-year-old boy in Germany lies in its resting pl […]

Locky's Dad is Nick Auden - the dad of three little kids: Lachlan ("Locky"), Hayley, & Evan - a loving husband, an athlete and a successful businessman!And he keeps surviving against all odds in his battle against Stage 4 Melanoma.Nick is determined to be a survival case study for other advanced melanoma fighters.But he needs access to a t […]

Known as a PACU, the "ball-cutter" fish has a set of chompers very similar to that of a human. Usually found only in warm waters of the Amazon River, the Pacu, a relative of the Piranha, can grow up to a length of 90cm and a weight of 25kg.So it came as a complete surprise when a 21cm Pacu was caught in an eel trap in Oresund Sound off the south co […]

[Be sure to scroll to the end of this post to find out how to share in very cool prizes!!]Roll Over... Roll Over... so they all rolled over and NONE FELL OUT!!Well, that's not really the way the song goes, but with a mattress specifically designed by Sealy, when one heavy person moves about in their sleep it's not felt by their partner. In my case, […]

Now here is something that I never considered when I started the Sealy Sleep Ambassador campaign.Of course, I’d heard about REM (rapid eye movement) sleep before and have read reports of how not getting enough can have serious consequences on my health. What I didn’t know was that I just haven’t been experiencing it often enough over recent years. I sort of […]

The video is very poor quality and short (on loop), but it's gone viral all thanks to actress, Porscha Coleman. Crazy Apple Store Freak-Out Lady The incident occurred when an unidentified woman entered the Grove Apple store in Los Angeles pushing a stroller and asked for some parts for her phone... a staff member at the Genius Bar advised her that if […]

As most of my long term readers are well aware, it's very rare these days that I will take part in campaigns and the like, unless it's really something that I'm passionate about or will be beneficial to the community at large. This time around, when OMY kindly invited me to take part in the 'Sealy Sleep Ambassador 2013' campaign, I h […]